“... gestures. Under what circumstances, if any, should the cloning of human beings be permitted? Lee Silver in his admirable book understands that the most important issue doesn’t centre on cloning but on the possibilities opened up by a field he calls ‘reprogenetics’. Reprogenetics draws on knowledge derived from developing techniques of assisted ...”

Jonathan Lethem: My Marvel Years, 15 April 2004

“... complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by Jack Kirby and scripted by Stan Lee, a defining artefact (I now know) of the Silver Age of comics.Luke was precocious, worldly, full of a satirical brilliance I didn’t always understand but pretended to, as I pretended to understand his frequent references ...”

“... me.’ Although he makes no mention of it, this is the fair but discouraging challenge that Arnold Silver has taken up. The ‘darker side’ alluded to by his title consists not, as Shaw himself might have expected, of the ‘crudely erotic’ but of the violent aspect of Shaw’s imagination. This is precisely the point where, I argued twenty years ago in a ...”

Thomas Jones: Jonathan Raban, 19 October 2006

“... yourself to be. On the way to her first meeting with Vanags, Lucy witnesses a car accident. A silver sedan crawling along in front of her swerves inexplicably into the path of an oncoming lorry. Later, a policeman tells her that the car was pulling out to pass a pickup truck that was turning right. Her memory of the crash seemed already old, like a ...”

Paul Laity: Worst case scenarios, 6 October 2005

“... If you’re feeling vulnerable in these cataclysmic times, stay clear of Lee Clarke, the Eeyore of American sociology and author of the forthcoming study of disaster, Worst Cases (Chicago, £16). ‘Doom is everywhere,’ he says, ‘catastrophes are common.’ Viruses as deadly as Ebola could circle the globe in 24 hours, ‘on the planes that don’t crash ...”

“... know, silent women.’ Indeed, on Sundays, the sinister uncle forces his wife to wear a monstrous silver choker that he made, in case we were disinclined to believe Finn. We hope, in the fairy-tale way, that good will triumph and that the little girl will escape from the nasty house on the hill (several times likened to Bluebeard’s Castle). She does. Of ...”

“... For his 15th Christmas, Erik Lee Preminger’s mother gave him an antique gold watch and two glass eyes set in clay, with a card which said: ‘Remember dear, Mother is always watching.’ She thought it a hysterically funny gift, but he found it strange and unsettling. The last thing he needed, on the brink of manhood, was a symbolic reminder of her domestic omnipotence ...”

Jonathan Lethem: My Spidey, 6 June 2002

“... has always been, Parker-Spider-Man is always an Other. Spider-Man’s official creator, Stan Lee (typically, for his generation of showmen, a de-Judaicised ‘Stanley Lieber’), has boasted: ‘Spider-Man’s costume covers every inch of his body . . . any reader, of any race’ – if not gender – ‘in any part of the world, can imagine himself ...”

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

“... acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of things: ‘Marina Warner came to lecture at the Highgate Institute ...”

Brian Dillon: Queer British Art, 6 September 2017

“... Convention’, we find John Singer Sargent’s 1881 portrait of an austerely boyish Vernon Lee, and Alvaro Guevara’s Dame Edith Sitwell from 1916. Laura Knight, three years earlier, had been condemned by the Telegraph for a self-portrait with a nude model that lacked ‘the higher charm of the “eternal feminine”’. A few such notable nudes ...”

“... books – Washington Confidential, New York Confidential and so on – turned out by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. The fearless duo, shrouded in their macintoshes and trilbies, would bring the naive reader the straight dope from the lower depths. They practised the same combination of rough-hewn populism and right-wing politics as a Mickey Spillane thriller or a ...”

C.K. Stead, 27 May 1993

“... Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her. Putting her into a taxi he ...”

David Cannadine, 15 September 1983

“... Theodore Martin lavished on the Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of all the flippant irreverences of Lytton ...”